MP3 Helper

In May of 2009 my friend Steve and I (iTripoli) released MP3 Helper as a tool that would help you to add artworks and lyrics to your MP3 collection so that you could enjoy an image while listening to songs on your iPod, iPad or iPhone devices. Little known was that fact that (when present in the file) lyrics could be displayed as you listen to a song.

The tool enumerated your collection and helped you to locate and select associated artwork and lyrics from the Internet to update the MP3 files so that they contained this valuable meta data.

MP3 Helper was a lesson in marketing for sure. While a nice idea that was pretty well executed, it struggled to get attention. Without serious marketing dollars, getting noticed when you were fighting for keywords like “MP3” and “iPhone” was practically impossible. After a couple of years, the product was left to die after less than a dozen sales. Yet somehow, the product’s Facebook page continues to get more than double that in new likes every month and is now at over 3,300 likes. I can’t explain why people would like a page featuring a product that died almost a decade ago and that they are extremely unlikely to have ever even seen. But thanks to some old screen shots I dug up, you can see it here: